April 13: This morning I woke up to heavy rain, but the bird feeder must go out regardless so I put on a coat, filled the feeder (we keep it inside at night to discourage the deer; they would empty it), took it out and hung it on its stand, threw peanuts out for the blue jays, then noticed that the wall of the shed was falling over. This one wall is all that remains of the old shed. We are doing a strange thing, having the shed rebuilt but leaving the one wall still standing. It's the only way we can preserve our climbing hydrangea, which is firmly attached to it. Anyway, there it was, leaning over at a sharp angle. It had been propped, but not, well, properly. I had to nail the prop to the new floor, in the heavy rain. And I noticed, doing it, how rewarding this little task was to do. I didn't care if the knees of my pants got wet, which they did. I got it done. I smiled to myself, at myself. Satisfying.
My wife complains that I'm not much of a fixer of things, and it's true, I'd rather hire somebody to do it, or just live with the problem. I'm very tolerant of problems and circumstances that drive other people over the edge. I was that way about a minor skin cancer I had on my ear many years ago, kept putting off going to the dermatologist to have it taken off until I finally decided to get it over with, he took it off, then he noticed a mole on my arm I hadn't noticed that was not your normal mole, had it biopsied, and saved my life. Lesson learned. Now I go to him once a year for a check-up, and about twelve years ago he found another one that I just thought was a weird brown spot on my face. Result? A plastic surgeon carved off a significant part of my left jowl. So now I wear a beard, to hide the imbalance this caused in my face when you look straight at me. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. Well, OK. But the beard looks nice. My barber approved of it immediately. Anyway: satisfaction. A job well done, or a needful thing, however small.
And it's especially satisfying when you fix something you own. My brother knew this, spent twenty years repairing his own roof (left the scaffolding up the whole time). He was a full-time small-town lawyer and had no spare time at all, or precious little, but he insisted he was going to do it, wouldn't hire anybody, and the roof leaked all those years. He was a trip, my brother. This house dated from about 1900, it was huge, and it was a mess. Extension cords ran from the dining room into the kitchen because the wiring in the kitchen was damaged. Only a couple of the burners on his stove, a genuine antique, worked. Raccoons lived under the roof of his porch and used to climb up the scaffolding and stare in his bedroom window at night. The third floor was unspeakable; plaster was falling down in every room. It was like living in a favela in Rio de Janeiro, a 6,000 sq. ft. favela with about eighteen rooms. But he did fix his roof before he died (of skin cancer), with the help of his sons. And the porch. And he finally hired help to do it.
I've never been that crazy. But I did build most of the bookcases in this house myself and did a decent job of it, too (although how hard is it to build bookcases?), and fixed the door of the shed years ago when it blew apart in a storm, and built the bed in the upstairs bedroom, which is both extremely sturdy and easy to take apart and move, and helped Percy Chadwick reroof my barn in Shrub Oak during my first marriage, when I, too, lived in a big old house, although that house was built closer to 1800; and I've always taken satisfaction in doing these things. Maybe it was my grandfather on my father's side. He was a tool-and-die maker; he made the wooden forms, that is, that became the patterns for industrial tools. Precision work. After he died his tool chest came to rest in the house my brother and I grew up in. So that particular kind of satisfaction is in our blood. Much more for my brother than for me, but I have at least a trace of it.
But the stronger satisfactions come from writing well, when I manage to do so, and that's the life I chose, just as my brother chose the law. Working with language. It can be enormously satisfying to do it well. I've written pieces and poems where I've wanted to pump my arm when I was finished, just like Tiger Woods pumps his arm when he rolls one in from 30 feet away. Wow, does that feel good! But then you meet these really smart guys who have been to college and could have gone down any number of roads and instead chose to spend their lives farming or in carpentry or mastering the arts of plumbing, like the Irish plumber we know who is both a perfectly fine plumber and a singer of Irish songs who is good friends with Pete Seeger and still performs whenever he can; and I watch our contractor, who knows how to put a building together, step by step, and can do all the jobs himself if he has to, in the right order, and is clearly proud of it. I like to watch Ask This Old House on TV; I take pleasure in the knowledge and skill of the people on that show. And I think sometimes that I might spend some future life doing that sort of thing. I think I would like it. Satisfaction is about mastery, developing and using a skill, and maybe the point of life is to find a skill that makes you want to pump your arm when you master it, and get better and better at it as life unfolds, and maybe it doesn't matter that much what the skill is as long as you give it your all. Maybe. Just a thought.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
ANNE REVERE
March 24, 2011:
The news clips accompanying the death of Elizabeth Taylor yesterday included a shot of the young Elizabeth playing opposite Anne Revere in National Velvet in 1944. Anne Revere was Elizabeth Taylor's mother in this movie and she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for it; but I cannot remember my own mother saying much about it at the time. In fact I may not even have known by then that they had been best friends when they were growing up. I was very young at the time, seven years old, and while we went to see the movie and I still remember one or two scenes from it, I don't remember her telling me anything about their relationship. What would you tell a seven-year-old about such a friendship in any case? Years later she mentioned it and there's a beautiful portrait photograph of Anne Revere, signed to my mother, in the box of family photographs I inherited, but she never told me much about their friendship. It was only later that I figured out that her silence probably had something to do with politics. Anne Revere was blacklisted for her left-leaning tendencies and her refusal to testify before one of those idiotic committees investigating communism in Hollywood, and my mother was a lifelong Republican.
What a shame that politics should divide old friends like that. But of course it does.My brother and I hardly dared talk politics with each other. He maintained, with determination, the family Republican tradition, and I turned Democrat in college. He insisted that his six children vote Republican. My children, on their own but no doubt partly under the influence of my wife and myself, grew up Democrats. For a time in our lives my brother and I had not much to do with each other. We weren't hostile, but my train ran one way and his another. And if the opportunity had arisen I would have wanted to know Anne Revere, and he probably wouldn't.
I've sometimes wondered whether there might have been such an opportunity if politics had not separated my mother and Anne Revere. I'm not much for fantasizing about alternative histories: what if the South had won the Civil War? what if Hitler had triumphed? what if Hillary Clinton were President? They seem pointless to me; what happens happens, what doesn't doesn't, and chance and fate play their eternal duet. But I could see where knowing Anne Revere--she comes back to the home town, has dinner with us, we get tickets to one of the many Broadway shows she acted in, and I dream of the theater instead of writing poetry and short stories and novels (poetry is the only one of these forms I really pursued) and she helps me break in--might have changed my life, and my mother's, in (can I say it?) dramatic ways. My mother had wanted a career, not just marriage, and she harbored a certain bitterness at the fact that her parents had prevented it. She wound up working for her father as his secretary, then marrying my father; and there was more to her than that, more than being able to type 120 words a minute. She had artistic talent, she was ambitious, and it all devolved on her husband and her two sons; she became ambitious for us. Just to have kept on knowing an active talented actress like Anne Revere might have enabled her to break away from those family constraints and done more with her life, and kept her mind more active, perhaps even made her a happier person.
Well, we can't know these things. Human life, it says in the I Ching, is limited and unfree, and it's true: circumstances constrain us, lead us down the path or paths that are available to us, and we make bad choices all the time. I sometimes wish I had not stopped writing poetry; I was good at it, I published poems in respectable places, I liked the feeling when I did it well. I wish my mother had maintained her friendship with Anne Revere, but wishes are useless things, little pangs of regret. Nevertheless I'm going to frame that portrait of Anne Revere and hang it up in my office in honor of my mother, and in gratitude for the fact that the road she did take led to a family that included me and my brother, and children and grandchildren in abundance. In her own way she was a great lady, too, a woman of character, and in her own setting, in her family and among her friends, she inspired a good deal of awe.
The news clips accompanying the death of Elizabeth Taylor yesterday included a shot of the young Elizabeth playing opposite Anne Revere in National Velvet in 1944. Anne Revere was Elizabeth Taylor's mother in this movie and she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for it; but I cannot remember my own mother saying much about it at the time. In fact I may not even have known by then that they had been best friends when they were growing up. I was very young at the time, seven years old, and while we went to see the movie and I still remember one or two scenes from it, I don't remember her telling me anything about their relationship. What would you tell a seven-year-old about such a friendship in any case? Years later she mentioned it and there's a beautiful portrait photograph of Anne Revere, signed to my mother, in the box of family photographs I inherited, but she never told me much about their friendship. It was only later that I figured out that her silence probably had something to do with politics. Anne Revere was blacklisted for her left-leaning tendencies and her refusal to testify before one of those idiotic committees investigating communism in Hollywood, and my mother was a lifelong Republican.
What a shame that politics should divide old friends like that. But of course it does.My brother and I hardly dared talk politics with each other. He maintained, with determination, the family Republican tradition, and I turned Democrat in college. He insisted that his six children vote Republican. My children, on their own but no doubt partly under the influence of my wife and myself, grew up Democrats. For a time in our lives my brother and I had not much to do with each other. We weren't hostile, but my train ran one way and his another. And if the opportunity had arisen I would have wanted to know Anne Revere, and he probably wouldn't.
I've sometimes wondered whether there might have been such an opportunity if politics had not separated my mother and Anne Revere. I'm not much for fantasizing about alternative histories: what if the South had won the Civil War? what if Hitler had triumphed? what if Hillary Clinton were President? They seem pointless to me; what happens happens, what doesn't doesn't, and chance and fate play their eternal duet. But I could see where knowing Anne Revere--she comes back to the home town, has dinner with us, we get tickets to one of the many Broadway shows she acted in, and I dream of the theater instead of writing poetry and short stories and novels (poetry is the only one of these forms I really pursued) and she helps me break in--might have changed my life, and my mother's, in (can I say it?) dramatic ways. My mother had wanted a career, not just marriage, and she harbored a certain bitterness at the fact that her parents had prevented it. She wound up working for her father as his secretary, then marrying my father; and there was more to her than that, more than being able to type 120 words a minute. She had artistic talent, she was ambitious, and it all devolved on her husband and her two sons; she became ambitious for us. Just to have kept on knowing an active talented actress like Anne Revere might have enabled her to break away from those family constraints and done more with her life, and kept her mind more active, perhaps even made her a happier person.
Well, we can't know these things. Human life, it says in the I Ching, is limited and unfree, and it's true: circumstances constrain us, lead us down the path or paths that are available to us, and we make bad choices all the time. I sometimes wish I had not stopped writing poetry; I was good at it, I published poems in respectable places, I liked the feeling when I did it well. I wish my mother had maintained her friendship with Anne Revere, but wishes are useless things, little pangs of regret. Nevertheless I'm going to frame that portrait of Anne Revere and hang it up in my office in honor of my mother, and in gratitude for the fact that the road she did take led to a family that included me and my brother, and children and grandchildren in abundance. In her own way she was a great lady, too, a woman of character, and in her own setting, in her family and among her friends, she inspired a good deal of awe.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
GRYPHONS
March 19, 2011:
In about an hour the moon will be full.
I've finally finished reading Marco Polo and among the many strange stories he tells is his account of the Roc, a giant bird of Eastern mythology capable of lifting an elephant off the ground. In fact Rocs feed off elephants, flying up with them high into the sky and then dropping them on the rocks and picking at the remains. If I remember correctly Sinbad the Sailor flies on the back of one in the Arabian Nights. These stories once circulated throughout the known world, riding on the backs of old classical sources into the Middle Ages and surfacing in Medieval encyclopedias and traveler's accounts like Polo's. The "Boke" of Sir John Mandeville, which I'm reading now, has even more of them. In any case I was reminded of gryphons, which are creatures with the bodies of lions and the heads and wings of eagles, and then of the gryphon's head in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Greek and Roman section, and how it struck me so many years ago when I first saw it. It's a small bronze head, basically an eagle's head with an open beak, part of the handle for a larger bronze cauldron that no longer survives. What I liked about it so much was the curve of the beak. I had never seen a curve so pure, so clean, and so savage at the same time, and I fell in love with it; I go back to visit it every time I'm there.
And that's the mystery I'm visiting here, these odd experiences that seem to come out of nowhere and attach themselves to us like a kind of fate almost, and we feel then that we have to pursue them wherever they find us. I tried to write a short story about a gryphon and an art dealer and his wife and her lover, who owned one just like the one in the Met--they're not that uncommon-- and how the art dealer in revenge decided to steal the lover's gryphon head while the lover was elsewhere in the apartment making love to the dealer's wife; but it never quite came off. And then there was the women and parrots theme, first encountered in another museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where there's a Tiepolo--the elder Tiepolo--painting of "Time Revealing Truth," an old art historical subject in which an elderly father Time unveils the naked body of Truth, who is always a woman with a sun shining over her head, thus illustrating the idea that the light of Truth shines everywhere and Truth is always naked. We still use the phrase, the naked truth, although the object itself becomes harder and harder to find.
At the foot of Truth in this painting stood a globe, also an obvious symbol, and then a richly conceived and colored parrot. What, I thought, was the parrot doing there? Apparently it was a symbol of luxury, and of course luxury and Truth can hardly coexist, so the placement is no doubt symbolic. But there it was; the subject intrigued me and once again I became committed to the pursuit of it and found it in paintings elsewhere, in Courbet, in Manet, in Italian Renaissance and Baroque masters; in a postcard collage by the poet John Ashbery; and in magazine ads. Here, surely, was another subject worthy of being fictionalized, and I tried to write a story about this one, too, and failed again. But these things stay with you, something in them attracts you, answers to a question, a theme, running through your mind that you're not even aware of, and so these objects seem meant for you, and you don't know why. Women and parrots. I'm under the impression that it is mostly women who keep parrots. In Courbet's painting a naked woman--definitely not Truth; she's a courtesan--leans back in a bed with her parrot perched on her upheld arm.
Well: my son finds me, he says, "infinitely strange." And I suppose I am, to be so carried away by these encounters; but the mind is a strange place, not too many steps away from the Medieval willingness to believe in very odd things like rocs and gryphons, not to mention ants the size of dogs that dig gold out of the ground with their paws, if what an ant has at the end of its legs are paws. (Let me add that I once met a tracker who claimed to be able to track an ant across a gravel driveway; but that's another story.) It is strange, the mind, and curious; and there is pleasure to be had in tracking experiences like these with works of art through the culture, following a trail to see where it leads. I won't be writing fictional stories about these things, but I am planning an essay on the Stendhal Syndrome, which is the mental "illness" that some people suffer when confronted with works of art, when they faint before them or suffer a catatonic shock. That hasn't happened to me, but I have trembled before them. The common people of ancient Greece used to chain the statues of their gods to the temples, to prevent them from walking away. The mind is strange, weird, full of wonders. There are no gryphons, true, but there have been dinosaurs; and children remain enthralled by them.
In about an hour the moon will be full.
I've finally finished reading Marco Polo and among the many strange stories he tells is his account of the Roc, a giant bird of Eastern mythology capable of lifting an elephant off the ground. In fact Rocs feed off elephants, flying up with them high into the sky and then dropping them on the rocks and picking at the remains. If I remember correctly Sinbad the Sailor flies on the back of one in the Arabian Nights. These stories once circulated throughout the known world, riding on the backs of old classical sources into the Middle Ages and surfacing in Medieval encyclopedias and traveler's accounts like Polo's. The "Boke" of Sir John Mandeville, which I'm reading now, has even more of them. In any case I was reminded of gryphons, which are creatures with the bodies of lions and the heads and wings of eagles, and then of the gryphon's head in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Greek and Roman section, and how it struck me so many years ago when I first saw it. It's a small bronze head, basically an eagle's head with an open beak, part of the handle for a larger bronze cauldron that no longer survives. What I liked about it so much was the curve of the beak. I had never seen a curve so pure, so clean, and so savage at the same time, and I fell in love with it; I go back to visit it every time I'm there.
And that's the mystery I'm visiting here, these odd experiences that seem to come out of nowhere and attach themselves to us like a kind of fate almost, and we feel then that we have to pursue them wherever they find us. I tried to write a short story about a gryphon and an art dealer and his wife and her lover, who owned one just like the one in the Met--they're not that uncommon-- and how the art dealer in revenge decided to steal the lover's gryphon head while the lover was elsewhere in the apartment making love to the dealer's wife; but it never quite came off. And then there was the women and parrots theme, first encountered in another museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where there's a Tiepolo--the elder Tiepolo--painting of "Time Revealing Truth," an old art historical subject in which an elderly father Time unveils the naked body of Truth, who is always a woman with a sun shining over her head, thus illustrating the idea that the light of Truth shines everywhere and Truth is always naked. We still use the phrase, the naked truth, although the object itself becomes harder and harder to find.
At the foot of Truth in this painting stood a globe, also an obvious symbol, and then a richly conceived and colored parrot. What, I thought, was the parrot doing there? Apparently it was a symbol of luxury, and of course luxury and Truth can hardly coexist, so the placement is no doubt symbolic. But there it was; the subject intrigued me and once again I became committed to the pursuit of it and found it in paintings elsewhere, in Courbet, in Manet, in Italian Renaissance and Baroque masters; in a postcard collage by the poet John Ashbery; and in magazine ads. Here, surely, was another subject worthy of being fictionalized, and I tried to write a story about this one, too, and failed again. But these things stay with you, something in them attracts you, answers to a question, a theme, running through your mind that you're not even aware of, and so these objects seem meant for you, and you don't know why. Women and parrots. I'm under the impression that it is mostly women who keep parrots. In Courbet's painting a naked woman--definitely not Truth; she's a courtesan--leans back in a bed with her parrot perched on her upheld arm.
Well: my son finds me, he says, "infinitely strange." And I suppose I am, to be so carried away by these encounters; but the mind is a strange place, not too many steps away from the Medieval willingness to believe in very odd things like rocs and gryphons, not to mention ants the size of dogs that dig gold out of the ground with their paws, if what an ant has at the end of its legs are paws. (Let me add that I once met a tracker who claimed to be able to track an ant across a gravel driveway; but that's another story.) It is strange, the mind, and curious; and there is pleasure to be had in tracking experiences like these with works of art through the culture, following a trail to see where it leads. I won't be writing fictional stories about these things, but I am planning an essay on the Stendhal Syndrome, which is the mental "illness" that some people suffer when confronted with works of art, when they faint before them or suffer a catatonic shock. That hasn't happened to me, but I have trembled before them. The common people of ancient Greece used to chain the statues of their gods to the temples, to prevent them from walking away. The mind is strange, weird, full of wonders. There are no gryphons, true, but there have been dinosaurs; and children remain enthralled by them.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
WHAT'S WRONG
The Ides of March:
Something I might usefully do from time to time is to try to figure out what's wrong, and whether there's anything we can do about it. That there is a great deal wrong, that we in America, and the world at large, are in more than usual trouble, is not an argument I think I need to make, even as an historian with a long view of these things who's seen, thankfully from the proper physical and historical distance, a whole lot of trouble. I was a child during World War II and WW II was bad, really bad, and I was too old for Vietnam even though I had the proper skill set as an ex-artillery officer, and that was bad, too, though not as bad; but the turmoil now seems more basic in a way, more threatening; there are more fundamentals involved. It's a fundamental for instance that there are too many people in the world--far too many already, 6,906,773,912 to be precise (as of this minute; tomorrow it will be more), and projected to reach 10 billion by the time my grandchildren are middle-aged. That in fact is the first thing, the primary thing, that's wrong:
TOO MANY PEOPLE.
Overpopulation.
It leads to poverty, starvation, overfishing and the resulting species extinction, overhunting and the same, pollution of all kinds, the depletion of every kind of resource; it exacerbates the problem of illiteracy and lack of education (we'll get to that later); it creates political turmoil which in turn creates dictatorships; it is virtually synonymous with suffering on a truly massive scale. It also raises all kinds of difficult philosophical questions about the purpose of life. Are we here merely to breed? Is more better? How do we convince the Catholic Church that they have it wrong, that even the Church fathers didn't think life began at conception? And what if it does, what kind of difference does that make and when does that difference reach its tipping point? How do we explain to the poor, living in a world where the more children they have the better the chance that at least some of them will survive, that this is not a healthy situation for Planet Earth?
How, to put it another way, do we get human beings to think farther ahead than their next meal, beyond their own neighborhood, to think in century lengths and see the Earth as an organism, now getting sicker by the minute?
The only answer is, one by one. By which time it will be too late.
This can get you down, this business of thinking big.
But we have no other choice. The hardest thing is to think outside our own boxes, to get past the proscenium arch behind which our own little dramas take place, our own little lives to resign, even, from our political party of choice, or else think larger than it thinks and see things over a time frame of more than one or two presidential terms. Very few people in politics or in life are capable of doing that, but we all have to learn or we're sunk as a species; the world will shrug us off.
That is what I'm going to try to do here, think a little longer than usual, and do it from time to time, and see where it leads. This is just a kind of introduction. I have to go cook dinner now. We have a guest coming. More later, when I'm not working on my book, which, by the way, is another attempt to think longer than usual.
Something I might usefully do from time to time is to try to figure out what's wrong, and whether there's anything we can do about it. That there is a great deal wrong, that we in America, and the world at large, are in more than usual trouble, is not an argument I think I need to make, even as an historian with a long view of these things who's seen, thankfully from the proper physical and historical distance, a whole lot of trouble. I was a child during World War II and WW II was bad, really bad, and I was too old for Vietnam even though I had the proper skill set as an ex-artillery officer, and that was bad, too, though not as bad; but the turmoil now seems more basic in a way, more threatening; there are more fundamentals involved. It's a fundamental for instance that there are too many people in the world--far too many already, 6,906,773,912 to be precise (as of this minute; tomorrow it will be more), and projected to reach 10 billion by the time my grandchildren are middle-aged. That in fact is the first thing, the primary thing, that's wrong:
TOO MANY PEOPLE.
Overpopulation.
It leads to poverty, starvation, overfishing and the resulting species extinction, overhunting and the same, pollution of all kinds, the depletion of every kind of resource; it exacerbates the problem of illiteracy and lack of education (we'll get to that later); it creates political turmoil which in turn creates dictatorships; it is virtually synonymous with suffering on a truly massive scale. It also raises all kinds of difficult philosophical questions about the purpose of life. Are we here merely to breed? Is more better? How do we convince the Catholic Church that they have it wrong, that even the Church fathers didn't think life began at conception? And what if it does, what kind of difference does that make and when does that difference reach its tipping point? How do we explain to the poor, living in a world where the more children they have the better the chance that at least some of them will survive, that this is not a healthy situation for Planet Earth?
How, to put it another way, do we get human beings to think farther ahead than their next meal, beyond their own neighborhood, to think in century lengths and see the Earth as an organism, now getting sicker by the minute?
The only answer is, one by one. By which time it will be too late.
This can get you down, this business of thinking big.
But we have no other choice. The hardest thing is to think outside our own boxes, to get past the proscenium arch behind which our own little dramas take place, our own little lives to resign, even, from our political party of choice, or else think larger than it thinks and see things over a time frame of more than one or two presidential terms. Very few people in politics or in life are capable of doing that, but we all have to learn or we're sunk as a species; the world will shrug us off.
That is what I'm going to try to do here, think a little longer than usual, and do it from time to time, and see where it leads. This is just a kind of introduction. I have to go cook dinner now. We have a guest coming. More later, when I'm not working on my book, which, by the way, is another attempt to think longer than usual.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
THE PRESIDENTIAL QUESTION MARK
March 13, 2011:
Last night we went to a dinner party and several of my closest friends fell into an argument about whether Hillary Clinton would have made a better president than Barack Obama. I was at the other end of the table and couldn't join in, and didn't want to in any case. I've had enough of that one. In 2008 Lorraine and I supported Hillary for the job over Barack, on the grounds that she had more experience, was tougher mentally, had been through the fire and knew how to fight for what she wanted, how to wield power. We almost lost friends because we took this stand; people we knew very well just could not believe we would support Hillary, who had voted for the Iraq war (as had 80 plus other Senators), and they were rather insulting about it. As it has turned out, many of those same people are now deeply disappointed by Barack. He is not the person his speeches persuaded them he was, not a savior from the left but a centrist still trying to find his balance in the midst of the current mindless chaos of American political life, and he has trouble connecting. He is, in fact, very much my kind of person: intellectual, somewhat aloof, and cautious. But I never thought my kind of person would make a good president. Jefferson was my kind of person, and he did not make a very good president and virtually retired from the job in his second term, spending a good deal of it at Monticello.
It makes for an interesting dilemma in any case, both for me personally and for the nation. For me, it becomes a question of finding my own balance between liking the man for the way he thinks and wanting someone stronger, more decisive, more impassioned. Presidents are always in the position of doing what they can, not what they want, and there's very little he can do faced with a loud, radical anti-Obama majority in the House and a tiny pro-Obama majority in the Senate. But he can't seem to make clear, or doesn't want to, what exactly he does stand for and hopes to accomplish; or when he does try to do that, he lacks the common touch that would sell it. He's rational, and politics is not. Politics is about feelings, desires, fear of the future, fear of the present. So I like him, but I don't approve of him. He's the flag fluttering in the wind, not the force of the wind itself. Maybe nobody could be such a force in the current environment, and it's hard to find a politician in any case who would do anything--stand on principle, for example--to jeopardize a second term. And for this nation, at this time, a second term for Obama is essential to our future. Nevertheless I wish he would make more mistakes, go out on a limb once in a while, take real risks. Risk is the dark forest where leaders become great.
As for the nation and its dilemma, I remain skeptical. The nation was formed in the first place out of a loose cantankerous federation of individual states, each with its own interests, some with slaves and some without, some predominantly mercantile, some agricultural, and to a degree it has not progressed very far from that situation. The slave states still resent their losses and insist on celebrating what is essentially a criminal past (in the sense of crimes against humanity), the heartland states still claim a specious moral superiority over the coastal states, which are, thank God, far more cosmopolitan and sophisticated, and there is very little common ground to stand on. Each party claims to represent the "real" America, which of course is the home of innocence, natural grandeur, and "freedom," and don't you forget it. We can't seem to grow up. We fight wars for "freedom" without acknowledging to ourselves--and that's the worst of it; it's one thing to lie to others, but to lie to ourselves is truly dangerous--that these wars are actually about our economic interests, most recently about oil, and about maintaining world power. Obama is at least clear on that subject; he is himself a realist and seems to understand that it's one thing to speak to the people of Egypt about freedom and tolerance and quite another to declare a no-fly zone over Libya.
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Americans of one sort continue to cling passionately to their nostalgia for a simpler, more straightforward world where the rights of gay people or blacks or women were never an issue and white men could expect to get a good job and raise a family and retire with enough money for a house on the lake; while those of another cling to the ideal of a constantly progressing society where everybody's rights are respected, the poor are given a fair chance and the country as a whole is dedicated to caring for its disadvantaged. Neither sort has much tolerance for the other any more, and zero understanding. The flood waters are rising and each sort struggles for the high ground. Who, indeed, could possibly run such a country? Meanwhile by all the standards by which nations are judged--crime rates; economic mobility; high school and college graduation rates; achievement levels in math and science; health care; infant death rates; obesity levels--we are failing. We stand close to the bottom of the industrialized modern nations on every one of these scales. Yet we continue to deceive ourselves about who we really are. We continue to sleep through this profound and possibly fatal crisis. What we need, I believe, is a leader who is willing to take that risk and speak truth to our inner complacencies, to challenge the self-righteousness we have for too many centuries hidden behind. To wake us up. And I doubt Obama has the stomach for it.
Last night we went to a dinner party and several of my closest friends fell into an argument about whether Hillary Clinton would have made a better president than Barack Obama. I was at the other end of the table and couldn't join in, and didn't want to in any case. I've had enough of that one. In 2008 Lorraine and I supported Hillary for the job over Barack, on the grounds that she had more experience, was tougher mentally, had been through the fire and knew how to fight for what she wanted, how to wield power. We almost lost friends because we took this stand; people we knew very well just could not believe we would support Hillary, who had voted for the Iraq war (as had 80 plus other Senators), and they were rather insulting about it. As it has turned out, many of those same people are now deeply disappointed by Barack. He is not the person his speeches persuaded them he was, not a savior from the left but a centrist still trying to find his balance in the midst of the current mindless chaos of American political life, and he has trouble connecting. He is, in fact, very much my kind of person: intellectual, somewhat aloof, and cautious. But I never thought my kind of person would make a good president. Jefferson was my kind of person, and he did not make a very good president and virtually retired from the job in his second term, spending a good deal of it at Monticello.
It makes for an interesting dilemma in any case, both for me personally and for the nation. For me, it becomes a question of finding my own balance between liking the man for the way he thinks and wanting someone stronger, more decisive, more impassioned. Presidents are always in the position of doing what they can, not what they want, and there's very little he can do faced with a loud, radical anti-Obama majority in the House and a tiny pro-Obama majority in the Senate. But he can't seem to make clear, or doesn't want to, what exactly he does stand for and hopes to accomplish; or when he does try to do that, he lacks the common touch that would sell it. He's rational, and politics is not. Politics is about feelings, desires, fear of the future, fear of the present. So I like him, but I don't approve of him. He's the flag fluttering in the wind, not the force of the wind itself. Maybe nobody could be such a force in the current environment, and it's hard to find a politician in any case who would do anything--stand on principle, for example--to jeopardize a second term. And for this nation, at this time, a second term for Obama is essential to our future. Nevertheless I wish he would make more mistakes, go out on a limb once in a while, take real risks. Risk is the dark forest where leaders become great.
As for the nation and its dilemma, I remain skeptical. The nation was formed in the first place out of a loose cantankerous federation of individual states, each with its own interests, some with slaves and some without, some predominantly mercantile, some agricultural, and to a degree it has not progressed very far from that situation. The slave states still resent their losses and insist on celebrating what is essentially a criminal past (in the sense of crimes against humanity), the heartland states still claim a specious moral superiority over the coastal states, which are, thank God, far more cosmopolitan and sophisticated, and there is very little common ground to stand on. Each party claims to represent the "real" America, which of course is the home of innocence, natural grandeur, and "freedom," and don't you forget it. We can't seem to grow up. We fight wars for "freedom" without acknowledging to ourselves--and that's the worst of it; it's one thing to lie to others, but to lie to ourselves is truly dangerous--that these wars are actually about our economic interests, most recently about oil, and about maintaining world power. Obama is at least clear on that subject; he is himself a realist and seems to understand that it's one thing to speak to the people of Egypt about freedom and tolerance and quite another to declare a no-fly zone over Libya.
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Americans of one sort continue to cling passionately to their nostalgia for a simpler, more straightforward world where the rights of gay people or blacks or women were never an issue and white men could expect to get a good job and raise a family and retire with enough money for a house on the lake; while those of another cling to the ideal of a constantly progressing society where everybody's rights are respected, the poor are given a fair chance and the country as a whole is dedicated to caring for its disadvantaged. Neither sort has much tolerance for the other any more, and zero understanding. The flood waters are rising and each sort struggles for the high ground. Who, indeed, could possibly run such a country? Meanwhile by all the standards by which nations are judged--crime rates; economic mobility; high school and college graduation rates; achievement levels in math and science; health care; infant death rates; obesity levels--we are failing. We stand close to the bottom of the industrialized modern nations on every one of these scales. Yet we continue to deceive ourselves about who we really are. We continue to sleep through this profound and possibly fatal crisis. What we need, I believe, is a leader who is willing to take that risk and speak truth to our inner complacencies, to challenge the self-righteousness we have for too many centuries hidden behind. To wake us up. And I doubt Obama has the stomach for it.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
SICK OF IT
February 26, 2011:
Do you ever wonder what the incessant din of spin, half-truths, and outright lies is doing to us? This din is everywhere, not just on cable but on Fox News (the most blatant example in our time), in countless magazine and newspaper pieces, in political speeches and news conferences, in advertisements for just about everything (ads specialize in it), in blogs of every imaginable kind, on countless web sites selling one idea or another, and even in interpersonal relationships, all of us trying to present our best faces to those who know us.
Most of my friends are pretty smart and most of us discount the bulk of what we see and hear. I cannot remember ever buying anything but a book because I saw it advertised. But the unending slaughter of the truth does affect us. For one thing it's depressing and disheartening; for another it makes us cynical. Is there anyone at all we can take seriously? Certainly not the religious types, after we have seen time and time again people who claim the moral high ground based on their faith and their devotion to service fail not only to live up to their ideals but then to lie about their behavior, or try to cover it up. My wife, who was raised Catholic, accuses me of being anti-Catholic, but it's not that simple. It's hard not to have some respect for an institution that has lasted for two millenia and done a fair amount of good in its charitable work. At the same time, how can one not detest the behavior of child-molesting priests, of whom there seem to be a myriad? And then what is one to think about the behavior of the Church in covering up this crime, a crime, may I add, against the most vulnerable among us, a crime that has devastating lifelong effects on its victims? It's sickening. And the whole business of the Church--any church--trying to take abortion rights away from women, or interfere in political life in any way, which their tax exempt status forbids them to do, burns me up. Keep your religious beliefs to yourself, whatever they are, whoever you are. Don't try to impose them on the rest of us.
Our culture assaults us on all levels, all the time, and it is thick with mendacity. It's one thing in politics; we have come to expect it there, and it's not clear that an honest politics is possible, given the self-contradictions built into public opinion and public demands. But one hopes for something better out of the best of the press, and we don't get it. I learned this years ago when I was writing my first book, which was about the mental health system, and paid close attention to the NYTimes's reporting on the subject, and watched them slant their reporting according to their interests. Mental patients have always gotten a raw deal, and nobody really cares. And it's not just the press; it's memoirs purporting to be true that are in fact lies, it's the numerous attempts to clean up history so it smells better, it's apologists for the South ignoring slavery, it's the unwillingness to face scientific facts. It's the din, the relentless nature of the lying, the fact that nobody ever runs an ad that says something like, "The truth is, Gelusil works better than Tums but it costs more, so the choice is up to you." Nobody ever gives a speech in Congress that says, "Yes, we're Republicans, and we do cater to the rich, for the following reasons."
It makes us cynical and we back off from our own politics, from our culture. Or if we're stupid or innocent we believe what we hear, and that's probably worse. I raised my kids to be ironic and skeptical, and in many ways they lost their innocence pretty quickly. But isn't that enormously sad, to have to do that in order to protect them? What is there to believe in? Is there a major American institution we can trust? Can we believe in America itself, which takes us into war and becomes responsible for the deaths of many many thousands on the basis of outright, deliberate lies? And the powerful people who do this, do they go to jail once exposed? Did Richard Nixon go to jail? Will Donald Rumsfeld?
Not a chance.
My advice to my countrymen? Be skeptical, learn irony. Educate yourselves about how the world actually works. Read Machiavelli; he's enlightening. And then own up inside yourselves to your own delusions, your own hypocrisy, so that you know hypocrisy when you see it. On a personal level, face to face, practise kindness and compassion. You're going to need it yourself some day. But most of all, educate yourself. Lionel Trilling once wrote an essay called "The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent." Exactly. Otherwise you become a dupe, part of the problem, easily fooled by the din, the ads, the lies, all designed to make you blind to your own interests and dead to nuance, complexity, and the genuine nobility and beauty that sometimes appears in human life.
Do you ever wonder what the incessant din of spin, half-truths, and outright lies is doing to us? This din is everywhere, not just on cable but on Fox News (the most blatant example in our time), in countless magazine and newspaper pieces, in political speeches and news conferences, in advertisements for just about everything (ads specialize in it), in blogs of every imaginable kind, on countless web sites selling one idea or another, and even in interpersonal relationships, all of us trying to present our best faces to those who know us.
Most of my friends are pretty smart and most of us discount the bulk of what we see and hear. I cannot remember ever buying anything but a book because I saw it advertised. But the unending slaughter of the truth does affect us. For one thing it's depressing and disheartening; for another it makes us cynical. Is there anyone at all we can take seriously? Certainly not the religious types, after we have seen time and time again people who claim the moral high ground based on their faith and their devotion to service fail not only to live up to their ideals but then to lie about their behavior, or try to cover it up. My wife, who was raised Catholic, accuses me of being anti-Catholic, but it's not that simple. It's hard not to have some respect for an institution that has lasted for two millenia and done a fair amount of good in its charitable work. At the same time, how can one not detest the behavior of child-molesting priests, of whom there seem to be a myriad? And then what is one to think about the behavior of the Church in covering up this crime, a crime, may I add, against the most vulnerable among us, a crime that has devastating lifelong effects on its victims? It's sickening. And the whole business of the Church--any church--trying to take abortion rights away from women, or interfere in political life in any way, which their tax exempt status forbids them to do, burns me up. Keep your religious beliefs to yourself, whatever they are, whoever you are. Don't try to impose them on the rest of us.
Our culture assaults us on all levels, all the time, and it is thick with mendacity. It's one thing in politics; we have come to expect it there, and it's not clear that an honest politics is possible, given the self-contradictions built into public opinion and public demands. But one hopes for something better out of the best of the press, and we don't get it. I learned this years ago when I was writing my first book, which was about the mental health system, and paid close attention to the NYTimes's reporting on the subject, and watched them slant their reporting according to their interests. Mental patients have always gotten a raw deal, and nobody really cares. And it's not just the press; it's memoirs purporting to be true that are in fact lies, it's the numerous attempts to clean up history so it smells better, it's apologists for the South ignoring slavery, it's the unwillingness to face scientific facts. It's the din, the relentless nature of the lying, the fact that nobody ever runs an ad that says something like, "The truth is, Gelusil works better than Tums but it costs more, so the choice is up to you." Nobody ever gives a speech in Congress that says, "Yes, we're Republicans, and we do cater to the rich, for the following reasons."
It makes us cynical and we back off from our own politics, from our culture. Or if we're stupid or innocent we believe what we hear, and that's probably worse. I raised my kids to be ironic and skeptical, and in many ways they lost their innocence pretty quickly. But isn't that enormously sad, to have to do that in order to protect them? What is there to believe in? Is there a major American institution we can trust? Can we believe in America itself, which takes us into war and becomes responsible for the deaths of many many thousands on the basis of outright, deliberate lies? And the powerful people who do this, do they go to jail once exposed? Did Richard Nixon go to jail? Will Donald Rumsfeld?
Not a chance.
My advice to my countrymen? Be skeptical, learn irony. Educate yourselves about how the world actually works. Read Machiavelli; he's enlightening. And then own up inside yourselves to your own delusions, your own hypocrisy, so that you know hypocrisy when you see it. On a personal level, face to face, practise kindness and compassion. You're going to need it yourself some day. But most of all, educate yourself. Lionel Trilling once wrote an essay called "The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent." Exactly. Otherwise you become a dupe, part of the problem, easily fooled by the din, the ads, the lies, all designed to make you blind to your own interests and dead to nuance, complexity, and the genuine nobility and beauty that sometimes appears in human life.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
MARGINALIA
February 22, 2011:
Yesterday the NYTimes carried a piece about the decline of marginalia in the age of the ebook, and I read it with more than usual interest because I am an inveterate writer of notes in the margins of my own books, unless the books have value, in which case I take notes in a notebook to keep from lowering that value. I do it, however, with mixed feelings. Because books last and human beings don't, I think of owning books as a kind of stewardship; they're doing to survive me, I keep them in pretty good condition, so what am I doing ruining them for the next owner, and possibly reader, by scribbling my thoughts, however brilliant, in the margins? But then I think, well I own the damned things, so why shouldn't I scribble in the margins? If I were to become a famous writer, besides, those notes might actually add to the value. Then I look at the notes I've written in books and see that virtually none of them are brilliant and most are trivial; so I go back and forth on the subject, but usually wind up lazy, and writing in the margins.
All this comes home to me because I'm currently rereading one of Henry James's best novels, The Ambassadors, I think for the third time, and there are my marginalia from the first time I read it, in college, more than fifty years ago, and it's like saying hello to somebody I recognize but don't entirely remember, and passing him in the street, smiling at him, all the while thinking to myself, "Who was that man?" Mostly, in this case, my marginalia are embarrassingly dumb, and I'm just as glad to have passed this fellow by.
But last night, reading in bed, one sentence I had written really struck me. "He shan't marry her now," it says, and as it happens he, being Lambert Strether, our hero, didn't marry her, didn't marry anybody, and came out of this novel with his honor intact, himself enlightened, but losing everything he thought he wanted, including the safety net of his job. But it wasn't my predictive power that struck me. It was the word "shan't." It was the first time I had seen this word in many years. And what struck me was that when I wrote it, in the late 1950s, it was much more common. Then I started thinking about how much else had changed since the 1950s, which was half a century closer to the world Henry James evokes so well in this novel, and how foreign the life that Lambert Strether and the other characters in the book took for granted must seem to readers today. Granted, the book is set in Paris, and that's foreign enough all by itself; but it's much more than that. The moral standards, the ways in which men and women related to each other, the levels of social sophistication, of refinement, of manners, have utterly changed. I wrote a piece in grad school, by which time I had become much more knowing, about the way James used manners in his novels, and cited as an example the occasion in Portrait of a Lady when our heroine, whose name I forget at the moment, walked into a room where her husband and the woman who had been his lover were together talking and he was sitting down while she was standing; and she knew from that fact alone all that was necessary: that they had been, possibly still were, intimate; because no man would allow a woman to stand while he sat unless they knew each other very very well.
But of course old novels are bound to be saturated with social milieus that have been lost. It's not as if this is a revelation. But when you land in your 70s you sometimes feel as if you've outlived your time, that you're stuck with old habits, old styles. I learned my manners many years ago and still have trouble not picking up the bill when I'm eating out with a female friend; I still hold doors open for people, but women especially, and my impulse is to stand up when a woman I don't know enters a room. In James's time manners were so well developed that you could read a great deal into the details; a gesture, a way of shaking someone's hand, a silence could tell you everything. The density of social life in his time is one of the great fascinations of his fiction, one of its rewards, and social life in this country in this our own time seems vastly diminished in comparison. So much has been lost. So much has been vulgarized. And no one can use the word "shan't" any more without seeming affected.
Maybe that loss has something to do with the current popularity of Jane Austen's work. We feel the loss. I think it is partly a loss of moral standards. Manners are based on morals: on mutual respect; on compassion and kindness; on thoughtfulness. Austen is a satirist and never tires of demonstrating among her characters the failure of compassion, kindness, thoughtfulness, and respect. Certainly we feel the loss in our politics, which are vicious and anything but kind; and compassion seems to have disappeared entirely.
As for marginalia, I suspect that soon enough programmers will figure out how to produce ebooks that allow marginalia to appear. Can we then predict the death of the physical book? I don't think so. I've written before about the pleasures of owning books and holding them in your hands, and whatever else is in decline, pleasure doesn't seem to be. I'll no doubt go on writing in the margins of my books and damn the consequences. My kids will wind up with most of them, and maybe they'll get a kick out of the old man's responses. I suppose it's a kind of bad manners to write in books, but nobody's perfect. Even Henry James, although, in The Ambassadors, he wrote a perfect book.
Yesterday the NYTimes carried a piece about the decline of marginalia in the age of the ebook, and I read it with more than usual interest because I am an inveterate writer of notes in the margins of my own books, unless the books have value, in which case I take notes in a notebook to keep from lowering that value. I do it, however, with mixed feelings. Because books last and human beings don't, I think of owning books as a kind of stewardship; they're doing to survive me, I keep them in pretty good condition, so what am I doing ruining them for the next owner, and possibly reader, by scribbling my thoughts, however brilliant, in the margins? But then I think, well I own the damned things, so why shouldn't I scribble in the margins? If I were to become a famous writer, besides, those notes might actually add to the value. Then I look at the notes I've written in books and see that virtually none of them are brilliant and most are trivial; so I go back and forth on the subject, but usually wind up lazy, and writing in the margins.
All this comes home to me because I'm currently rereading one of Henry James's best novels, The Ambassadors, I think for the third time, and there are my marginalia from the first time I read it, in college, more than fifty years ago, and it's like saying hello to somebody I recognize but don't entirely remember, and passing him in the street, smiling at him, all the while thinking to myself, "Who was that man?" Mostly, in this case, my marginalia are embarrassingly dumb, and I'm just as glad to have passed this fellow by.
But last night, reading in bed, one sentence I had written really struck me. "He shan't marry her now," it says, and as it happens he, being Lambert Strether, our hero, didn't marry her, didn't marry anybody, and came out of this novel with his honor intact, himself enlightened, but losing everything he thought he wanted, including the safety net of his job. But it wasn't my predictive power that struck me. It was the word "shan't." It was the first time I had seen this word in many years. And what struck me was that when I wrote it, in the late 1950s, it was much more common. Then I started thinking about how much else had changed since the 1950s, which was half a century closer to the world Henry James evokes so well in this novel, and how foreign the life that Lambert Strether and the other characters in the book took for granted must seem to readers today. Granted, the book is set in Paris, and that's foreign enough all by itself; but it's much more than that. The moral standards, the ways in which men and women related to each other, the levels of social sophistication, of refinement, of manners, have utterly changed. I wrote a piece in grad school, by which time I had become much more knowing, about the way James used manners in his novels, and cited as an example the occasion in Portrait of a Lady when our heroine, whose name I forget at the moment, walked into a room where her husband and the woman who had been his lover were together talking and he was sitting down while she was standing; and she knew from that fact alone all that was necessary: that they had been, possibly still were, intimate; because no man would allow a woman to stand while he sat unless they knew each other very very well.
But of course old novels are bound to be saturated with social milieus that have been lost. It's not as if this is a revelation. But when you land in your 70s you sometimes feel as if you've outlived your time, that you're stuck with old habits, old styles. I learned my manners many years ago and still have trouble not picking up the bill when I'm eating out with a female friend; I still hold doors open for people, but women especially, and my impulse is to stand up when a woman I don't know enters a room. In James's time manners were so well developed that you could read a great deal into the details; a gesture, a way of shaking someone's hand, a silence could tell you everything. The density of social life in his time is one of the great fascinations of his fiction, one of its rewards, and social life in this country in this our own time seems vastly diminished in comparison. So much has been lost. So much has been vulgarized. And no one can use the word "shan't" any more without seeming affected.
Maybe that loss has something to do with the current popularity of Jane Austen's work. We feel the loss. I think it is partly a loss of moral standards. Manners are based on morals: on mutual respect; on compassion and kindness; on thoughtfulness. Austen is a satirist and never tires of demonstrating among her characters the failure of compassion, kindness, thoughtfulness, and respect. Certainly we feel the loss in our politics, which are vicious and anything but kind; and compassion seems to have disappeared entirely.
As for marginalia, I suspect that soon enough programmers will figure out how to produce ebooks that allow marginalia to appear. Can we then predict the death of the physical book? I don't think so. I've written before about the pleasures of owning books and holding them in your hands, and whatever else is in decline, pleasure doesn't seem to be. I'll no doubt go on writing in the margins of my books and damn the consequences. My kids will wind up with most of them, and maybe they'll get a kick out of the old man's responses. I suppose it's a kind of bad manners to write in books, but nobody's perfect. Even Henry James, although, in The Ambassadors, he wrote a perfect book.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
FOOLS RUSH IN
February 16, 2010:
Maureen Dowd has a column in today's NYTimes in which she comments on a series of plays produced by the Pentagon and entitled "The Great Game." The plays are about the history of Afghanistan and I find it a hopeful sign that the Pentagon thinks the history of Afghanistan is an important thing to understand, although it comes a bit late, nine years late, to be exact. In an ideal world--i.e., an intelligent world--the Pentagon would have known something about the history of Afghanistan well before it went in, flags flying, guns blazing, to drive out the Taliban and capture Osama bin Laden, neither of which they managed to do. But at least they're beginning to recognize that that might have helped. They're slow learners, to be sure, but at least they can now see how useful it would have been to know things like, oh, the language, and the tribal nature of Afghan society, and that even more useful thing, Afghan history.
That name, in fact, is encouraging all by itself. "The Great Game" is what the British called their long-standing, more or less bloodless contest with Russia in central Asia in the nineteenth century. The British had conquered India and India was a prize everybody wanted, but the Russians were the closest, they were expanding their own empire through central Asia toward the Himalayan passes, and Great Britain invaded Afghanistan in order to forestall the Russians acquiring influence and land in the area. The best book on the subject is Peter Hopkirk's book of the same name (The Great Game); it's long, but an easy read, and very enlightening. As we should all know, the British failed miserably to subdue the Afghans and in 1842, after promising to let them go unharmed, Afghan tribesmen descended on the last British column to leave Afghanistan at one of those Himalayan passes and killed them to the last man, woman, and child. Well, no--I think there was one survivor. We always need one, who, like Ishmael, bobbing on his coffin in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, can live to tell us the story of the search for the great white whale, and the unfortunate destruction of the Pequod, ship and crew alike, by that selfsame whale. In any case, referring to the Great Game is a good sign; it means that the Pentagon has, or has acquired, people who know the nineteenth century history and therefore something about Afghan society and its stunning otherness. Know, that is, that it operates by rules totally unlike our own.
It was the same thing in Iraq. It is always the fools who rush in, where just a little knowledge would have been enough to have added a note of caution. I remember writing about this in the pages of the Sag Harbor Express, our little local newspaper where for a while I had a column, in 2003, before the U. S. went into that country, flags flying, guns blazing, and trying to remind my few readers (I thought of them as the happy few) that it wasn't that simple. I knew something about Iraq: not the language, I'm afraid, but the culture. And how did I know? Years before I had read T. E. Lawrence's book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and I had subsequently seen David Lean's great movie based on the book, Lawrence of Arabia. And Lawrence did speak the language, he knew the names of and the relationships between the various Arab tribes, he had read the Koran and could quote swatches of it from memory, he understood the differences between the Shia and the Sunnis, and he knew how to speak to tribal leaders and what motivated them and how they lived and thought. And here were the Americans, diving 80 years later into this complex situation, thinking they would be greeted by Iraqis carrying flowers.
Now that's not much: one book, one movie, not very impressive for an I-told-you-so moment like this one. But it was clear that the Americans hadn't even bothered to know that much. Like so many empires before them, the American empire was ham-fisted and ignorant, and seemed to think ignorance was a virtue. Empires are arrogant by nature; they are built on arrogance, but a certain amount of arrogance can be helpful. The problem is that ignorance is the twin brother of arrogance, and the two together become delusional. And no one seems to learn. Currently we have the Tea Party, just as arrogant, just as unknowing, charging into Washington thinking they can eliminate a culture, defenestrate a huge, often wasteful, but still essential bureaucracy, and simplify the enormous complexity of the way Washington works with a bunch of mottoes. The Federal Government is in fact a lot like Afghanistan, and it will destroy you if you don't educate yourself about how it works and why.
Not knowing history is one of the many ways, in short, of being stupid. The levels of stupidity in the world never cease to amaze. According to Reuters, one third of all Russians believe the sun revolves around the earth. According to a Pew Foundation poll, half of all Republican voters believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. (I owe these facts to my very knowing son.) It's funny, yes, but then it's not, because ignorance has consequences, large ones, and the stupider we get the worse they're going to be. I have no solutions to this. I don't see the United States suddenly getting smart in the near future, although Barack Obama is a hell of a lot smarter than George Bush. The fact is, it all just makes me sad. I am an aged man and I would like to die happy, and I cannot do so when my country is in such steep decline. I fear for my children and my grandchildren. Sometimes I think they should learn French or Spanish and get the hell out of here before it's too late. Maybe they should learn Swedish and get themselves to the ancestral home in Jonskoping. Global warming can only benefit Sweden.
Maureen Dowd has a column in today's NYTimes in which she comments on a series of plays produced by the Pentagon and entitled "The Great Game." The plays are about the history of Afghanistan and I find it a hopeful sign that the Pentagon thinks the history of Afghanistan is an important thing to understand, although it comes a bit late, nine years late, to be exact. In an ideal world--i.e., an intelligent world--the Pentagon would have known something about the history of Afghanistan well before it went in, flags flying, guns blazing, to drive out the Taliban and capture Osama bin Laden, neither of which they managed to do. But at least they're beginning to recognize that that might have helped. They're slow learners, to be sure, but at least they can now see how useful it would have been to know things like, oh, the language, and the tribal nature of Afghan society, and that even more useful thing, Afghan history.
That name, in fact, is encouraging all by itself. "The Great Game" is what the British called their long-standing, more or less bloodless contest with Russia in central Asia in the nineteenth century. The British had conquered India and India was a prize everybody wanted, but the Russians were the closest, they were expanding their own empire through central Asia toward the Himalayan passes, and Great Britain invaded Afghanistan in order to forestall the Russians acquiring influence and land in the area. The best book on the subject is Peter Hopkirk's book of the same name (The Great Game); it's long, but an easy read, and very enlightening. As we should all know, the British failed miserably to subdue the Afghans and in 1842, after promising to let them go unharmed, Afghan tribesmen descended on the last British column to leave Afghanistan at one of those Himalayan passes and killed them to the last man, woman, and child. Well, no--I think there was one survivor. We always need one, who, like Ishmael, bobbing on his coffin in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, can live to tell us the story of the search for the great white whale, and the unfortunate destruction of the Pequod, ship and crew alike, by that selfsame whale. In any case, referring to the Great Game is a good sign; it means that the Pentagon has, or has acquired, people who know the nineteenth century history and therefore something about Afghan society and its stunning otherness. Know, that is, that it operates by rules totally unlike our own.
It was the same thing in Iraq. It is always the fools who rush in, where just a little knowledge would have been enough to have added a note of caution. I remember writing about this in the pages of the Sag Harbor Express, our little local newspaper where for a while I had a column, in 2003, before the U. S. went into that country, flags flying, guns blazing, and trying to remind my few readers (I thought of them as the happy few) that it wasn't that simple. I knew something about Iraq: not the language, I'm afraid, but the culture. And how did I know? Years before I had read T. E. Lawrence's book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and I had subsequently seen David Lean's great movie based on the book, Lawrence of Arabia. And Lawrence did speak the language, he knew the names of and the relationships between the various Arab tribes, he had read the Koran and could quote swatches of it from memory, he understood the differences between the Shia and the Sunnis, and he knew how to speak to tribal leaders and what motivated them and how they lived and thought. And here were the Americans, diving 80 years later into this complex situation, thinking they would be greeted by Iraqis carrying flowers.
Now that's not much: one book, one movie, not very impressive for an I-told-you-so moment like this one. But it was clear that the Americans hadn't even bothered to know that much. Like so many empires before them, the American empire was ham-fisted and ignorant, and seemed to think ignorance was a virtue. Empires are arrogant by nature; they are built on arrogance, but a certain amount of arrogance can be helpful. The problem is that ignorance is the twin brother of arrogance, and the two together become delusional. And no one seems to learn. Currently we have the Tea Party, just as arrogant, just as unknowing, charging into Washington thinking they can eliminate a culture, defenestrate a huge, often wasteful, but still essential bureaucracy, and simplify the enormous complexity of the way Washington works with a bunch of mottoes. The Federal Government is in fact a lot like Afghanistan, and it will destroy you if you don't educate yourself about how it works and why.
Not knowing history is one of the many ways, in short, of being stupid. The levels of stupidity in the world never cease to amaze. According to Reuters, one third of all Russians believe the sun revolves around the earth. According to a Pew Foundation poll, half of all Republican voters believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. (I owe these facts to my very knowing son.) It's funny, yes, but then it's not, because ignorance has consequences, large ones, and the stupider we get the worse they're going to be. I have no solutions to this. I don't see the United States suddenly getting smart in the near future, although Barack Obama is a hell of a lot smarter than George Bush. The fact is, it all just makes me sad. I am an aged man and I would like to die happy, and I cannot do so when my country is in such steep decline. I fear for my children and my grandchildren. Sometimes I think they should learn French or Spanish and get the hell out of here before it's too late. Maybe they should learn Swedish and get themselves to the ancestral home in Jonskoping. Global warming can only benefit Sweden.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
February 8, 2011:
In today's NY Times I was pleased to see a piece on p. A16 about the end of Congressional earmarks. I knew this would come back to bite them. Last fall on a cold Sunday Lorraine and I were in Montauk, having just had lunch out at a local restaurant, and we parked in a parking lot overlooking the entrance to Lake Montauk, no longer a lake in fact but an inner harbor used by commercial fishermen, a yacht club, and five or six boatyards. To the commercial fishermen it's an essential place; nowhere else in that area could they find such a beautifully safe docking area. But the entrance periodically silts up. So who dredges it? The Federal government. And I said to Lorraine, what happens if earmarks get killed? What if we get a Tea Party Congressman out here committed to ending earmarks, and suddenly his constituents discover that he's the guy responsible for making it impossible to get this entrance dredged; he's the guy who's destroying the Montauk fishing industry, and forcing boatyards to close, etc. etc.? According to the Times, this is now happening across the country. Congress ended earmarks, and now the people who voted for these ideologues are finding out that some of those earmarks that are no longer acceptable were for them; they were some of their favorite projects, in fact, that were going to provide jobs and fix roads and fund research and all the other things that require more money than is available locally to make them happen. That idiot John McCain has made earmarks his favorite target, thinking maybe that would get him elected next time, and has gone most recently after research projects involving honeybees, apparently unaware that honeybee colonies are suffering, and have been suffering for years, long term colony collapse. In other words, bees are dying off, bees are essential to the pollination of food crops, particularly fruit trees, as well as flowers, and food supplies will be in serious trouble if bees disappear. So a million or two of Federal money devoted to figuring out what's going on and how to fix it is very much money well spent.
It goes without saying that not all earmarks make sense. Under ex-Senator Ted Stevens Alaska, the crybaby of the Western world, got fat on bad projects, the famous "bridge to nowhere" being just one of them, all the while complaining endlessly, mindlessly about Federal involvement in Alaskan affairs. But Stevens is gone, and throwing out earmarks because some of the projects seem wasteful doesn't solve the problem. Nothing actually solves the problem; the problem is one of those things you have to live with in order to make use of it when it's not wasteful, when it's absolutely necessary. It's politics, it's all local, as Tip O'Neill said, and the process of scratching somebody else's back when they've scratched yours is just part of the game.
The real problem is ideology: the purist, or Puritan, mentality that sees the world from one perspective only, recognizes no virtue in the other side, and can't compromise on its so-called principles. Spare me your angst, liberals and conservatives alike. Conservative demagoguery is just ridiculous. Listen to Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity for five minutes, which is about all it takes, and you don't know whether to laugh or throw up. Conservative economics is merely a screen for maintaining the status quo and keeping the rich, their own kind, rich; it has been taken apart again and again by the facts, but it lives on nevertheless. The liberals have fewer demagogues but they can be blind to the reasoning behind various conservative positions, which are based, fundamentally, in a much darker conception of human nature than theirs, and therefore blind to the serious flaws of American democracy, which, if it is to survive, is in desperate need of a better educated populace, which probably isn't going to happen.
In the name of balancing the budget, then--to which one can only say, get real--we no longer have earmarks, and communities all over the country are going to suffer, losing useful research projects and essential infrastructure repair and all manner of other things that need doing. Good work, guys. You've made your silly point. Now could you please wake up from your neat little dreams and start actually governing the country?
In today's NY Times I was pleased to see a piece on p. A16 about the end of Congressional earmarks. I knew this would come back to bite them. Last fall on a cold Sunday Lorraine and I were in Montauk, having just had lunch out at a local restaurant, and we parked in a parking lot overlooking the entrance to Lake Montauk, no longer a lake in fact but an inner harbor used by commercial fishermen, a yacht club, and five or six boatyards. To the commercial fishermen it's an essential place; nowhere else in that area could they find such a beautifully safe docking area. But the entrance periodically silts up. So who dredges it? The Federal government. And I said to Lorraine, what happens if earmarks get killed? What if we get a Tea Party Congressman out here committed to ending earmarks, and suddenly his constituents discover that he's the guy responsible for making it impossible to get this entrance dredged; he's the guy who's destroying the Montauk fishing industry, and forcing boatyards to close, etc. etc.? According to the Times, this is now happening across the country. Congress ended earmarks, and now the people who voted for these ideologues are finding out that some of those earmarks that are no longer acceptable were for them; they were some of their favorite projects, in fact, that were going to provide jobs and fix roads and fund research and all the other things that require more money than is available locally to make them happen. That idiot John McCain has made earmarks his favorite target, thinking maybe that would get him elected next time, and has gone most recently after research projects involving honeybees, apparently unaware that honeybee colonies are suffering, and have been suffering for years, long term colony collapse. In other words, bees are dying off, bees are essential to the pollination of food crops, particularly fruit trees, as well as flowers, and food supplies will be in serious trouble if bees disappear. So a million or two of Federal money devoted to figuring out what's going on and how to fix it is very much money well spent.
It goes without saying that not all earmarks make sense. Under ex-Senator Ted Stevens Alaska, the crybaby of the Western world, got fat on bad projects, the famous "bridge to nowhere" being just one of them, all the while complaining endlessly, mindlessly about Federal involvement in Alaskan affairs. But Stevens is gone, and throwing out earmarks because some of the projects seem wasteful doesn't solve the problem. Nothing actually solves the problem; the problem is one of those things you have to live with in order to make use of it when it's not wasteful, when it's absolutely necessary. It's politics, it's all local, as Tip O'Neill said, and the process of scratching somebody else's back when they've scratched yours is just part of the game.
The real problem is ideology: the purist, or Puritan, mentality that sees the world from one perspective only, recognizes no virtue in the other side, and can't compromise on its so-called principles. Spare me your angst, liberals and conservatives alike. Conservative demagoguery is just ridiculous. Listen to Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity for five minutes, which is about all it takes, and you don't know whether to laugh or throw up. Conservative economics is merely a screen for maintaining the status quo and keeping the rich, their own kind, rich; it has been taken apart again and again by the facts, but it lives on nevertheless. The liberals have fewer demagogues but they can be blind to the reasoning behind various conservative positions, which are based, fundamentally, in a much darker conception of human nature than theirs, and therefore blind to the serious flaws of American democracy, which, if it is to survive, is in desperate need of a better educated populace, which probably isn't going to happen.
In the name of balancing the budget, then--to which one can only say, get real--we no longer have earmarks, and communities all over the country are going to suffer, losing useful research projects and essential infrastructure repair and all manner of other things that need doing. Good work, guys. You've made your silly point. Now could you please wake up from your neat little dreams and start actually governing the country?
Sunday, February 6, 2011
SUNDAY MORNING
February 6, 2011:
I was channel surfing the other night and ran across a show about the soul, and scientific interest in studying it, that turned out to be mostly about a twelve-year-old American boy who remembered, at the age of two, or maybe three, being shot down in a plane over an Okinawan bay near the end of World War II and being trapped, and dying, in his cockpit. The University of Virginia has a center that rounds up accounts like this from all over the world and has thousands of them; it was founded by a psychologist whose name was Ian Stevenson, who persisted, in the face of large scale scorn and indifference among his peers, to pursue this during his entire career. That particular example came from this center; most of Stevenson's examples, however, were from the Middle and Far East, where reincarnation is an accepted idea. What usually happens in such cases is that those who remember their past lives forget them by the age of five, a fact that most people would consider made them unreliable witnesses, although the memories can be extraordinarily specific, as this boy's was. But five is the cut-off point. After that it all fades away.
I've always been curious about the idea of reincarnation. I know that if I had grown up recalling my life as a participant in the Russian revolution, as my psychic friend Leor once told me I had been, I would be likely to believe in the idea; no, more, I would be certain of it. But what then? Would it explain anything about my current life? And if we live out life after life but have no memories of any of them, and only rare exceptions have any such memory, how can it help me now? I mean me, Anthony Brandt, son of Axel Hjalmar Brandt and Grace Scott, brother of the late Charles Henry Brandt, father of Kate and Evan, husband of Lorraine Dusky. Me in all my particularity, shaped by my upbringing, my genes, my height, my bodily gifts and woes, my education, my reading, my loves and losses. What of the Russian who was supposedly reborn in me? I can find no trace of him unless perhaps it's a fondness for vodka (although when I was younger I only drank Scotch). I don't know a word of Russian except nyet, which everybody knows. The Buddhists say there is no self and my daughter tells me that when they are asked what it is that reincarnates, they laugh and say, "bad habits." The self, however, the me, dies, evaporates, is as if it had never been. Thus their effort in this life to detach themselves from it.
I am what I suppose you could call not-quite-a-Buddhist. I grew up in the Methodist Church but it didn't take. My parents never went to church except on Easter and didn't, I think, believe a word of it and my mother used to say that hell was not a place you went to after you died, it was life on earth. So much for Christianity. I was taken recently, reading about Dante, by something St. Augustine had written, that souls do not suffer in the fires of hell (it may have been purgatory, although I think purgatory was invented well after Augustine's time) because they're hot--souls do not feel physical pain--but because they are trapped in fire, they take the shape of fire, are fire, and can never be free of it. It's a wonderful image, very seductive, but it won't do. It's that "never," and its implications. "Never" renders it meaningless to human consciousness; "never" blots everything out.
Anyway the point I'm getting to is that if something survives, a soul, say, well, that soul is quite clearly not me. Not the person, or personality, that so preoccupies my time now, in my 70s, staring at mortality and wondering what language the dead speak. Am I fond of myself? Do I like myself? Is the "who" that "I" am worth preserving? I do like myself, but I don't think it matters a hoot whether the me that is me survives. All that will survive of me, my wise daughter reminds me, is my words, maybe a million of them by now, preserved in the dozens of magazines I've written for and the few books. Keep writing this blog, Dad, she tells me.
But I will be sorry to leave this world. "Death is the mother of beauty," writes Wallace Stevens in "Sunday Morning," a poem that is rich with the love of the world; and when I look at the birds, the trees, the harbor, and in the spring the tiny insects that hover over the flowers of our Arctic thyme, I realize how attached to it I still am. The hawk that preens its wings on the back of one of the benches on our deck is a handsome fellow indeed. When my brother was told he had a year to live he slowly backed off from things, from people; but my old friend Carter Jones, who died in a plane crash and told me a week before that he no longer dreamed about the future, that his nighttime dreams were dark, abyssal, well, Carter was somebody who savored the ice cream he would eat like no other man I've ever known. He tasted it like nobody else. He lived richly. Maybe that's not me who loves the birds and the wild storms and the ocean, but the soul currently occupying this me. I don't know. I try to maintain a Socratic ignorance. And now Lorraine wants to go out to Sunday brunch, and I have to finish this post. "Is there no change of death in paradise? / Does ripe fruit never fall?" The words are from "Sunday Morning," and they ask an immortal question. Are we forever, or just for now? We don't know. We mustn't know, because death is the mother of beauty.
I was channel surfing the other night and ran across a show about the soul, and scientific interest in studying it, that turned out to be mostly about a twelve-year-old American boy who remembered, at the age of two, or maybe three, being shot down in a plane over an Okinawan bay near the end of World War II and being trapped, and dying, in his cockpit. The University of Virginia has a center that rounds up accounts like this from all over the world and has thousands of them; it was founded by a psychologist whose name was Ian Stevenson, who persisted, in the face of large scale scorn and indifference among his peers, to pursue this during his entire career. That particular example came from this center; most of Stevenson's examples, however, were from the Middle and Far East, where reincarnation is an accepted idea. What usually happens in such cases is that those who remember their past lives forget them by the age of five, a fact that most people would consider made them unreliable witnesses, although the memories can be extraordinarily specific, as this boy's was. But five is the cut-off point. After that it all fades away.
I've always been curious about the idea of reincarnation. I know that if I had grown up recalling my life as a participant in the Russian revolution, as my psychic friend Leor once told me I had been, I would be likely to believe in the idea; no, more, I would be certain of it. But what then? Would it explain anything about my current life? And if we live out life after life but have no memories of any of them, and only rare exceptions have any such memory, how can it help me now? I mean me, Anthony Brandt, son of Axel Hjalmar Brandt and Grace Scott, brother of the late Charles Henry Brandt, father of Kate and Evan, husband of Lorraine Dusky. Me in all my particularity, shaped by my upbringing, my genes, my height, my bodily gifts and woes, my education, my reading, my loves and losses. What of the Russian who was supposedly reborn in me? I can find no trace of him unless perhaps it's a fondness for vodka (although when I was younger I only drank Scotch). I don't know a word of Russian except nyet, which everybody knows. The Buddhists say there is no self and my daughter tells me that when they are asked what it is that reincarnates, they laugh and say, "bad habits." The self, however, the me, dies, evaporates, is as if it had never been. Thus their effort in this life to detach themselves from it.
I am what I suppose you could call not-quite-a-Buddhist. I grew up in the Methodist Church but it didn't take. My parents never went to church except on Easter and didn't, I think, believe a word of it and my mother used to say that hell was not a place you went to after you died, it was life on earth. So much for Christianity. I was taken recently, reading about Dante, by something St. Augustine had written, that souls do not suffer in the fires of hell (it may have been purgatory, although I think purgatory was invented well after Augustine's time) because they're hot--souls do not feel physical pain--but because they are trapped in fire, they take the shape of fire, are fire, and can never be free of it. It's a wonderful image, very seductive, but it won't do. It's that "never," and its implications. "Never" renders it meaningless to human consciousness; "never" blots everything out.
Anyway the point I'm getting to is that if something survives, a soul, say, well, that soul is quite clearly not me. Not the person, or personality, that so preoccupies my time now, in my 70s, staring at mortality and wondering what language the dead speak. Am I fond of myself? Do I like myself? Is the "who" that "I" am worth preserving? I do like myself, but I don't think it matters a hoot whether the me that is me survives. All that will survive of me, my wise daughter reminds me, is my words, maybe a million of them by now, preserved in the dozens of magazines I've written for and the few books. Keep writing this blog, Dad, she tells me.
But I will be sorry to leave this world. "Death is the mother of beauty," writes Wallace Stevens in "Sunday Morning," a poem that is rich with the love of the world; and when I look at the birds, the trees, the harbor, and in the spring the tiny insects that hover over the flowers of our Arctic thyme, I realize how attached to it I still am. The hawk that preens its wings on the back of one of the benches on our deck is a handsome fellow indeed. When my brother was told he had a year to live he slowly backed off from things, from people; but my old friend Carter Jones, who died in a plane crash and told me a week before that he no longer dreamed about the future, that his nighttime dreams were dark, abyssal, well, Carter was somebody who savored the ice cream he would eat like no other man I've ever known. He tasted it like nobody else. He lived richly. Maybe that's not me who loves the birds and the wild storms and the ocean, but the soul currently occupying this me. I don't know. I try to maintain a Socratic ignorance. And now Lorraine wants to go out to Sunday brunch, and I have to finish this post. "Is there no change of death in paradise? / Does ripe fruit never fall?" The words are from "Sunday Morning," and they ask an immortal question. Are we forever, or just for now? We don't know. We mustn't know, because death is the mother of beauty.
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